[WinPartners] Internet Explorer 7 Release Project

[Alexander Kozlov]

Good afternoon.

Information Services & Technology has launched a project to evaluate and 
prepare for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) in the MIT environment. IS&T has 
been evaluating earlier beta versions over the past several months and is 
now increasing our efforts and engaging the community in further testing 
of MIT sites and functionality including certificate authentication since 
Microsoft has announced their intention to release IE7 in the fourth 
quarter of this calendar year.

The release of IE7 may have a big impact on many areas around MIT. IE7 
beta 3 is public and can be freely downloaded from Microsoft site
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4c1a8fbe-fb6a-47ac-867dbb1f17e477ee&displaylang=en.
If you have a test environment where you can test IE7 with the sites you 
need to use for MIT learning and business, we would appreciate hearing 
about your experience. You are welcome to participate in the release 
effort by sending your test results and findings to ie7-release at mit.edu. 
You can monitor progress of IE7 release to MIT community at http://web.mit.edu/swrt/releases/ie7 site.

Internet Explorer 7 provides improved navigation through tabbed browsing, 
web search right from the toolbar, advanced printing, easy discovery, 
reading and subscription to RSS feeds, and much more.

Internet Explorer 7 provides security through a robust new architecture, 
security features that help defend against malicious software (also known 
as malware), and new ways to better protect against the theft of personal 
data from fraudulent websites, a practice known as phishing.

IE7, currently beta 3, will run on Windows XP SP2, Windows 64-bit, Windows 
Server 2003 SP1, and Windows Vista beta2.
A more complete list of features for Internet Explorer 7 are available at 
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/about/features/default.mspx

Current Caveats (or Known issues):

In our preliminary testing we found that MIT certificate generation works 
in IE7 beta 3 when default settings are used but fails with enhance 
security settings, we will conduct addition tests with various security 
levels to better understand the cause.

In all Windows Vista beta 2 builds we tested so far MIT certificate 
generation fails.

Microsoft plans to release Internet Explorer 7 through Windows Update 
Service which will upgrade IE6 to IE7, users might not be aware they are 
upgrading to IE7 when selecting Express option under Windows update.

A tool is currently available from Microsoft to block this Automatic 
Update. Depending on the severity of any issues that are uncovered, we may 
recommend that some segments of the community download and apply the block 
before Microsoft releases IE7. We will provide periodic updates with the 
current list of known issues and updates on solved problems throughout the 
effort. Once we have a more complete picture of the impact IE7 will have 
for MIT based on the working with the community, we will communicate our 
recommendations.


Alexander Kozlov
Windows Platform Coordinator
Software Release Team
Information Services & Technology
MIT
W92-148, Cambridge, MA 02139

Tel  (617) 253-5103
Fax (617) 258-8736